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Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure
Author(s) -
Beuret Nicholas
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12317
Subject(s) - politics , situated , climate change , action (physics) , dilemma , political economy , political science , focus (optics) , sociology , environmental ethics , law and economics , economic system , epistemology , economics , law , computer science , geology , philosophy , oceanography , physics , optics , quantum mechanics , artificial intelligence
The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.